Many students may not see themselves in the imagery and representation in their prospective disciplines or careers. Part of Peralta Community College District’s grant project was to encourage faculty to build more diverse representation into their curriculum for Career Technical Education (CTE) courses and support them in drawing connections among the course content, students’ lives, and their futures. This blog post will focus on the E7 criterion of the Peralta Online Equity Rubric, specifically:
The "Content Meaning" criterion of the equity rubric asks us to look at our course content and determine ways to make it personally relevant to students. More specifically, the criterion asks that this relevance is based upon students' sociocultural background in connection with others. Sociocultural contexts consider the societal forces that impact our values, beliefs, and attitudes about learning and life in general. Making connections between course content and these value sets can make a tremendous positive impact on students' ability to connect to the course material. For a course to be aligned with this category: “Communications and activities draw connections among course content, students’ lives, and students’ futures.” For a course to achieve exemplary in this category, “Students connect course content to their identities, backgrounds, and cultures, and/or the identities, backgrounds, and cultures of others.”
Within Bloom’s taxonomy, three learning domains are identified: cognitive, psychomotor and affective (Pierre & Oughton, 2007). Within most curriculum design, the focus remains upon creating content that meets learning occurring in the cognitive domain, which often bypasses areas making content personally relevant for students. Reaching students at the affective domain helps with intrinsic motivation. The RSA Animate video below provides a rationale for why intrinsic motivation is important. Though the speaker focuses on the workplace, replacing "work" with "learning" makes the idea applicable to course design.
This 10-minute video offers a powerful analogy for how an educator might consider designing content that moves away from the carrot-and-stick approach to learning. This approach follows a “learn-to-earn model” of design. Whereas we are suggesting within this module a “learn-to-learn model” of design that makes explicit the value and applicability of academic content to students’ ability to thrive. It’s no secret that students often struggle to engage with content that they feel does not impact their “real lives” or only satisfies a requirement. To increase engagement, create content that is relevant to students in the following ways:
Watch the videos below to see how three instructors from Peralta aligned their CTE courses with the Peralta Equity Rubric. In these spotlights, they will discuss how specifically, they have met the criteria for E7, providing content that is directly relevant to students’ lives. Click on the images to launch the videos!
Business Instructor, Alta Erdenebaatar, has a Google Maps-based discussion called your Favorite Entrepreneur, in which students are asked to identify entrepreneurs who have made an impact on their lives or communities. Watch her talk more about it in this 3-minute video.
In this 3:45 video, Construction Management Instructor, Melissa McElvane, discusses her final project in which students role-play three stakeholder roles in the construction industry to develop hands-on skills.
Suzan Tiemroth-Zavala discusses how every activity in her Job Search course is meant to prepare students for skills they need to successfully get the job they desire. Check out this 4-minute video as she explains how she curates meaningful curriculum.
Authors:
Chelsea Cohen
CTE Pathways Grant Coordinator
Inger Stark
Peralta Professional Development Coordinator
Adrienne Oliver
Peralta Online Equity Initiative Trainer
Kevin Kelly
Higher Education Consultant
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District or those of the California Community College Chancellor’s Office.
Prior to receiving the CVC-OEI Improving Online CTE Pathways Grant, there was a need to improve the quality of our CTE and GE-related online courses. Our professional development offerings, DE-related positions, and opportunities for peer review and collaboration to support this endeavor at the college were lacking.
Upon receiving the grant, our project goal was to improve the quality of online CTE courses and programs by aligning 15-20 existing online CTE and CTE-related GE courses to the CVC-OEI Course Design Rubric by developing our own local POCR program, as well as a districtwide Peer & Mentoring Review program with our sister colleges, Diablo Valley College and Los Medanos College.
Course alignment to the OEI rubric is very work intensive. Funding to continue our local POCR program is necessary for mentors, mentees, a POCR lead, and to support faculty professional development. An obstacle that we are facing is norming our local POCR program with the districtwide POCR so that courses are well-prepared to move onto the state level and become OEI quality review badged.
Students at Contra Costa College should know that more and more of CCC’s online CTE and GE-related CTE courses are undergoing a comprehensive peer review process to significantly improve the quality of our online course offerings. These improvements in quality directly support the success of our CCC students.
CCC’s local POCR program has aligned 15 courses to the CVC-OEI Online Course Design Rubric and this fall 2020, will align 7 more.
Authors:
Michael Kilivris
Faculty; POCR Lead
Anthony Gordon
Faculty; POCR Lead
Maritez Apigo
Distance Education Coordinator
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District or those of the California Community College Chancellor’s Office.
Lassen Community College (LCC) is a rural college in the northeast corner of California. LCC is located in Susanville, situated on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and over 200 miles from the nearest large city, Sacramento. Due to the remote location, LCC has been striving to provide more solid distance educational opportunities. LCC’s goal with the CVC-OEI Improving Online CTE Pathways Grant was to develop online courses and programs that would increase our online offerings within CTE as well as improve online instruction and student support services.
Using grant funds, LCC was able to develop a new fully online Geographical Information Systems (GIS) certificate. The GIS certificate can be completed in just two semesters and is well suited to provide individuals with the education necessary to enter the workforce as an entry-level GIS Technician, or add to an existing or future bachelor’s degree education to help strengthen and solidify the technical nature of said degree. For example, a combination of a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology and a certificate in GIS can be a very valuable and powerful combination to potential employers. The applications of this certificate will be an enhancement to the current Fire Technology and Agriculture degree programs at LCC. There are thousands of organizations in virtually every field using GIS in some form including education, public safety, health, transportation, real estate, utility companies, insurance, retail, natural resources, manufacturing, and government. This new certificate program has received all approvals and was offered to students in Fall 2020. A current student provided this feedback about the certificate “I started the GIS program more as a hobby, but quickly found it was applicable to my job as a municipal firefighter. Mapping hydrants based on their gpm, tracking incident types by location, mapping areas around the city to preplan for high danger interface zones, and much more. I have come to learn how important GIS is for so many industries. Having a knowledgable instructor who has experience and a passion for the subject is great too.”
Developing this new program did not come without obstacles. A major obstacle was finding an adjunct instructor to help design the certificate, develop curriculum, and shepherd the new certificate through the approval processes. There were also initial concerns regarding software necessary to instruct the course did not materialize and the instructor found financially sustainable resources for students’ use.
LCC Academic Senate was committed to accepting and developing a local POCR team to enhance the current online offerings as well as any future online course development. The grant allowed LCC to provide professional development opportunities for faculty members to become POCR certified. LCC’s POCR trained Instructional Designer is currently assisting the GIS adjunct faculty to align all the courses to the CVC-OEI Rubric.
Authors:
Michell Williams
Grant Operations Manager
Roxanna Haynes
Interim Dean of Instruction
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District or those of the California Community College Chancellor's Office.
Taft College developed the CVC-OEI project around a tripartite goal of
Central to achieving these goals was streamlining efforts to both clarify the path and to help students stay on the path as articulated in Guided Pathways. Since the College serves a rural area in West Kern County, our project directly corresponded to student requests for more online options. A sizable portion of our students work, commute, and balance family obligations that necessitate online options. Therefore, our primary goal was to transition some of our online CTE programs to meet the increasing need for flexibility and efficiency for more students to complete their programs, according to their fluctuating schedules. A secondary goal was to increase the quality of the programs by aligning some of the courses to the OEI rubric.
Of the 14 Certificate of Achievements (CoA) in career education, we focused on the “low hanging fruit” or programs that were already partially online and/or transitioning to online. Additionally, we identified programs already identified as priority industry sectors by the Central/Motherlode Regional Consortium (CRC), of which Taft College is a member of the 15 college-strong group.
Faculty and Instructional Designers
Faculty have been central to the planning and implementation of the project by first, weighing in on which programs would be best suited for hybrid and/or online programs, and second, ensuring that the 10 CTE programs offered aligned with the CRC Consortium’s priority industries:
Additionally, we consulted our student success data, specifically looking at success rates to help us further determine which classes should remain face-to-face and which could be moved online and aligned.
Improving the Quality of Existing Certificates
Since the implementation of the project, it has been a collaborative effort wherein content faculty developed their courses for online delivery and/or align them to the OEI rubric. With the help of instructional designers (IDs) who have received extensive training and certification through @ONE, content faculty were given support to complete this project. Instructional designers work to support faculty through
Step 1: Understanding the CVC-OEI Rubric
To assist faculty in transitioning face-to-face courses to online, one Instructional Designer, created a Canvas course for any faculty member wanting to learn about the process of aligning courses with the CVC-OEI Rubric. This annual 3-day training takes place in the spring using Canvas for asynchronous instruction and Zoom for synchronous instruction. Using feedback from those who successfully complete the training, accessibility was identified as a challenging area, and so this particular area has been expanded.
Step 2: Working with Instructional Designers
Once faculty completed the training session, the next step involves working directly with an instructional designer. After a number of reviews, some more challenging areas for faculty were identified. The most challenging areas for faculty were those from Section D-Accessibility of the CVC-OEI Rubric. Below is just a sampling of some of the areas identified:
D1: Heading Styles
From an accessibility perspective, headings are valuable as they provide individuals using screen readers with a simple method to navigate within a Content Page. Therefore, we provided training on how to properly tag headings within a Content Page:
Use the styles from the drop-down paragraph styles menu. Highlight the heading, then choose the heading level from the drop-down list. The title of each Canvas Page is Heading Level 1 (H1), so the styles available for faculty begin with level 2 (H2) and proceeds to H3 and H4. There is both a visual difference (for sighted students) and a coded difference for students using a screen reader. When importing different documents such as slides, pdfs, or WORD documents, training is provided to faculty to explain how to use the individual accessibility features within these different programs.
D4: Tables & D9: Slides
Training was also provided in the areas of creating tables and including slides in Canvas. Creating tables within the Canvas Content Editor is different from including external sources with tables. Zoom training was provided by one of the Instructional Designers to help faculty understand how to format columns and tables for accessibility when using an outside source, such as MS WORD. Additionally, faculty liked to use PowerPoint in classes, so there was additional Zoom training provided to explain how to make slides accessible.
D7: Images
Accessibility is comprehensive, so the instructional designers offered training on how to use images in Canvas since any images used in content pages must provide content to all students, including those who are visually challenged. The alternative text, called alt text for short, allows you to provide a description of the image. There are times when images not only provide information; they also serve a function, such as a button or links to additional resources. In this case, the alt text should clarify the function. Finally, there are scenarios where descriptive alt text is not required because the image is purely decorative. To simplify, the alt text should include the following:
D12: Video
In the areas of videos and accessibility, Taft College’s Distance Education department provided a number of helpful pdfs that faculty can follow to learn how to embed and use video in their courses. Because the options are so varied (e.g. embedding videos into a discussion, uploading video to YouTube, and creating your own videos), there are a number of helpful links that faculty can follow. This is certainly helpful for getting videos into the course, but Instructional Designers discovered some faculty members felt challenged captioning their videos for accessibility. Thus, Distance Education staff have provided an entire section on using Canvas Studio to address this area. One Instructional Designer worked directly with a faculty member using Canvas Studio to caption videos.
Sustainability
Taft College is invested in the CVC-OEI project and continues to offer many resources to faculty who want to learn more about using Canvas or create accessible course content. The Distance Education department has created and shared numerous videos for students and faculty. Also, we plan to continue our professional development series, entitled Lunch and Learn (LaL), that we launched last fall for all faculty. Our workshops and presentations are offered virtually and are saved in a Canvas shell for future reference. In addition, the Professional Development Committee (PDC) plans activities for the Fall, Spring, and May in-services for faculty to acquire new skills and build on established practices. Taft College is committed to training faculty to use modern technology, ensure accessibility, and andragogical techniques to enable our students to have the best possible outcome when participating in the online environment.
Conclusion
While the CVC-OEI project has helped to provide guidance for faculty and staff in online course development, it has also created some challenges for our faculty and staff. These challenges are primarily related to accessibility in online courses. Our Instructional Designers have worked hard to train faculty in accessibility requirements to successfully produce distance education courses that are understandable, meaningful, and accessible to our students with and without disabilities. We believe that our institution can provide the best online educational experience through our training programs and our instructional designers’ commitment. We have achieved a sustainable and effective means to support Taft College’s commitment to providing high-quality programs through our training methodologies.
Authors:
Amar Abbott
High Tech Access Specialist
Adam Bledsoe
Professor, Business, Management & Economics
Juana Rangel-Escobedo
Counselor, Student Success
Veronica Van Ry
Professor, Sociology
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District or those of the California Community College Chancellor's Office.
As a professor in both health sciences and environmental technology, I understood the unspoken difference between courses that were considered “general education” courses compared to the career or technical education courses. Career education was “hands-on” and not considered useful to teach “online”. Well, that was until SARs COV-2 hit with the world with a vengeance and created one of the worst pandemics this generation has seen. With over 225, 000 (and counting) dead in the United States alone, people from all walks of life realized that wearing masks and maintaining social distance would be here for more than a few short months… and at the rate the US has gone, well let’s just say, in my opinion, normal won’t be around for another year or two.
We all know that life can’t just stop, and as thinking beings, we try and figure out workarounds to deal with work, school and home life. From an educational perspective, the timing couldn’t have been better to be participating in a grant opportunity focused on online learning for career education programs. With the help of “cutting-edge” online design experts housed right on my college campus, I can now say that career education CAN be taught successfully in a fully online DE format.
Needs
My program in Environmental Technology, which offers both Associate of Science degrees and Certificates of Achievement in Environmental Management and Occupational Health and Safety, is what I like to call the “best-kept secret” on campus (and probably the local community). The program is small but mighty as many of my former students are respected professionals in their fields. The challenge has always been lack of advertisement funding, and “dog and pony” shows can only get so many students in the door. Having taught online for numerous years with my GE courses, I felt that creating a fully online Certificate of Proficiency that could be taught to students everywhere, not just my local community, would be a perfect way to introduce students to important careers in safety and environmental compliance.
The CVC-OEI Improving Online CTE Pathways Grant couldn’t have come at a better time. Not only would we “CTE” faculty be challenged to apply online andragogy to technical courses, but we would also end up supporting our students with these changes because COVID19 was just around the corner. What this activity taught me and other fellow faculty members who participated in the grant was that successful online education was possible for career education, too. The program will therefore continue to convert face-to-face courses to fully online or hybrid courses with a future goal of also making the awards “zero textbook costs” to further support our students.
Project Goals and Relevance to Students
The primary goals for this grant included increasing enrollment and developing a Solid Waste Technician Certificate of Proficiency that could be completed in two semesters. Students new to this area of study might decide, upon successful completion of the “mini-certificate ”, that completing either the AS or the Certificate of Accomplishment would be even more beneficial, since completion of these degrees (AS in Environmental Management or Occupational Health and Safety) or certificates also includes a 40-hour HazWOPER certificate for the Environmental Management awards, or an OSHA 30-hour General Industry Safety certification for the Occupational Health and Safety awards. Both of these certifications are highly coveted in environmental and safety careers.
As our new online courses launched this semester, we found that for the first time since the inception of the program, the Introduction to Environmental Technology course has enrolled close to the class maximum number of students allowed. The impact to the program and college is significant because this course can carry its weight to enhance enrollment in all the other courses offered in the program. The benefits don’t stop with the college and the discipline. Students also benefit greatly, since many who are not from the local community were able to register and take this introductory career education course because it was offered fully online. Students can now learn this specialized field of study without having to be within driving distance of the college that offers it (and few offer this program in California). Another positive student impact is the flexibility that these fully online courses offer. Many students don’t have the ability to get to campus because of transportation challenges, and others are often working multiple part-time or full-time jobs. This new online certificate gives more students the flexibility and support that are critical to their success.
Lessons Learned and/or Obstacles Encountered
Like all project and grants, there are lessons to be learned and obstacles that need to be addressed. In short, because I am a more senior faculty member at my college, the technological prowess needed to develop the design one envisions requires a learning curve that in some cases will likely be under-estimated, as was the case for me personally. Those with sharp computer and software skills will not likely take as much time to “get the hang of it.” Thankfully these obstacles were not insurmountable because of the support of our current Online Learning Center staff. Without their assistance, I doubt that I would have been this successful developing this course. It is a very time-consuming process, so I encourage people to give themselves ample time to transform face-to-face courses to fully online courses, especially when lab components must be included.
Major Project Accomplishments
This semester is the first time offering the first two fully online career education courses in environmental technology, and the feedback I have been given from anonymous student surveys is positive. The courses have been designed to minimize student confusion and to maximize student support and interaction. It will take a few semesters of data to determine how successful these courses will be. The faculty anticipate that with these positive results, and the ability to offer these courses through CVC-OEI Course Exchange, the program will likely increase in student enrollment and completion, giving students the opportunity to work in careers that pay higher than average wages and are in demand.
Author:
Marie Vicario
Professor, Health Sciences & Environmental Technology
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District or those of the California Community College Chancellor's Office.
Distance Education Disparities at Sacramento City College
Although the closing of the success rate gap between DE and on-ground modalities in the last year in the CCCs is rightfully celebrated, there are—within the disaggregation of those data—strikingly low success and retention rates in our Black student population at the CCCs; this is no exception at Sacramento City College (SCC) and its sister Los Rios District Colleges. The Wraparound Services grant at SCC is an effort to impact those disparities with the development of increased services for students in the DE environment.
SCC Wraparound Grant
The grant goals include the development of a robust online student support hotline, a case management process, a clearer understanding of ways to address the low DE success rates of our most disproportionately impacted students, and the sharing of successful practices. The most impactful and important of the grant goals is the effort to understand and address disparities in DE success rates of our Black students. Efforts to understand these disparities have already influenced systemic change at the college and will have a positive effect on the experiences of Black students.
A Community Development Approach: Organizing from the Inside
Instrumental to the understanding of the causes of lower DE success rates of Black is the use of community development methodologies, typically employed by community organizations aiming to change public policy or community practice but used in this case to strengthen the relationships between the micro-communities within the larger campus community and create change from within.
Larger Context of SCC: Systemic and Community Racism
No college campus exists separate from its community. In Sacramento, pervasive systemic racism is exemplified by the death of Stephon Clark, which mobilized national protests against systemic excessive use of force against Blacks. Several local incidents of racist attacks and even racist graffiti on the campus of SCC are indicators of the kinds of social injustice and bias that our Black students face every day. Campus administrators, staff, and faculty have been diligently working to address such social injustices, which undermine students’ abilities to feel safe in the community and focus on their academic work at SCC. But how does a whole college mobilize to erase the results of centuries of subjugation?
Efforts such as AB 705 and Chancellor Oakley’s commitment of the whole CCC system to mobilize in order to change the educational outcomes for our Black and other disproportionately impacted students have awakened our attention to the very real results of years of systemic bias and subjugation, but actionable steps other than the provision of extra resources to those students impacted are difficult to identify. As Isabel Wilkerson outlines in Caste: The Origins of our Discontents, the system of subjugating Blacks was set up intentionally hundreds of years ago and is successful in hiding its bias. Those of us living within its privilege—those of us most likely to be running the institutions themselves—have a difficult time seeing the systemic causes of disparities. That’s intentional by the design of the system. She cites research that “negative messaging about African-Americans” is so pervasive that even Blacks have an unconscious bias against themselves (187). This implicit bias baked into the US way of life causes inequities in housing, employment, healthcare, and even education. These inequities were codified, according to Wilkerson, in government programs such as the New Deal, Social Security Act, and Wagner Act—all of which “excluded the vast majority of Black workers,” thus also excluding them from the generational wealth that provides enough socioeconomic stability to pursue higher education (185). Her summary assessment is worth citing at length:
The very machinery upon which many white Americans had the chance to build their lives and assets was forbidden to African-Americans who were still just a generation or two out of enslavement and the apartheid of Jim Crow, burdens so heavy and borne for so long that if they were to rise, they would have to work and save that much harder than their fellow Americans.
Rather than encouraging a greater understanding of how these disparities came to be or a framework for compassion for fellow Americans, political discourse has usually reinforced prevailing stereotypes of a lazy, inferior group getting undeserved handouts, a scapegoating that makes the formal barriers all the more unjust and the resentments of white working-class citizens all the more tragic. (184-185).
Whether the barriers to equity and success in higher education are formal or informal, they are part of a system that exacerbates disparities, especially in distance education where students require unfettered access not only to the academic technology required to enter the distance education environment but also the skills to use it and the information competency to navigate it. Additionally, as revealed in the nation’s sudden shift to online education in the COVID-19 pandemic, having safe, quiet workspace is also required and yet hard to come by for our most disproportionately impacted students.
How to Change Direction: Community Development as a Tool for Change
Given the systemic causes of racial disparities in education, it will take systemic changes to counteract the centuries of inequality and subjugation. AB 705 is an example of wide, systemic change designed to reduce barriers to our disproportionately impacted students, but at the campus level, we also have a responsibility to our students to examine and change the system to correct such disparities as evidenced by the DE success gap.
Instead of a continuing or empowering a political discourse that reinforces unfounded biases and stereotypes, and instead of assuming on behalf of Black students what is necessary to change in our campus system of education, campus leaders must elicit change by bringing directly to the table those communities they most need to and want to help. But despite seeing “a steady stream of research and writing that ties educational failure to the effects of poverty and racism . . . most educators have no idea what to do about that” (Warren and Mapp, 2011). I am no different. As a white DE Coordinator and principal investigator for this grant, I lack the in-depth understanding of what is needed in order to help Black students perform better in DE courses. Over the last year, I steeped myself in the research of social justice and systemic racism, and I imagined several one-time or reoccurring interventions such as provision of academic technology device access to assist Black students. But none would lead to permanent change. Turning to my experience as an ethnographer and working with community developers seeking social justice, I employed community development methods to bridge gaps between the justice we desire at SCC and the understanding of what we need to do in order to achieve it. And although this work has required the majority of the grant period to take root, it has a promising future.
What I Did and What You Can Do
Specifically, Community Development (CD) or Community Organizing works to mobilize community groups to elicit change from political or government systems or entities. In this case, I worked from within the campus organizational structure of shared governance to bring the Black and Latinx student community to the DE table for the foreseeable future in order to improve the system from the inside. I also started to and continue to build relationships with colleagues who support Black students on campus, working hard to bridge or break down the student services-instruction silos that seem to naturally result from institutional organizational structures.
Access: Gaining Trust
Despite working within the same campus structure, it took time to gain the trust and commitment of the community of colleagues whose primary job is to support Black students. This time investment to “gain access” to any community is part and parcel of any kind of community development work, but it was an essential part of the nature of this project and resulted in conversations that helped create a method of change for the long haul rather than a series of one-time events that would be gone in a semester.
What We Created: Student DE Advisors
After numerous meetings and communications that ran right into the COVID-19 Great Shift to fully online campus operations, it became clear that the originally planned and scheduled focus groups of Black DE students facilitated by Black faculty colleagues would not be possible. The original goal of asking focus group participants to attend DE committee meetings whenever possible morphed into a job of Student DE Advisor where students already working at the campus Ashé and Rasa Centers that support Black and Latinx students would be hired to attend DE-related shared governance meetings regularly, learn about the DE environment in the district and state, and work with the DE Team long-term to help identify and institute systemic changes that would help Black students succeed in the DE modality. One of the tenets of community development work is that community members should be compensated for participating in community-related development or organizing work whenever possible in the interest of parity and accountability. College employees are paid to do the same academic work, and paying students to engage repeatedly in shared governance allows them to forego other jobs that might be too time-consuming to allow volunteer participation at the same intensity.
A team of two students joined the DE team officially in the Fall semester, supplementing their peer advisor roles at their respective centers with 5-10 hours per week as DE Advisors. (See text box for detailed job description). The team of two students represent the Black, Latinx, and LGBT student communities, serving also as peer mentors for those student communities at SCC.
The two advisors meet with me, the DE Coordinator, regularly to discuss what they and their peers have been experiencing in the DE environment, results from special tasks they have been assigned such as gathering specific feedback from their communities and to discuss their perspective about the shared governance meetings they have attended. They also regularly attend meetings of the campus academic senate, district academic senate, campus student senate, DE committee, and other related committees. The more meetings they attend, the more they gain confidence in speaking at these meetings as a representative of students, and the more they can help me filter the shared governance processes through the lens of disproportionately impacted students.
What We Are Learning about the Black and Latinx Student Experience
From the process of gaining access and learning about the lives of our Black students, so much has been learned already.
Hard to Stay Positive
The racism on campus and in the larger community environment takes a toll on students. We ask a lot of our Black students, expecting them to concentrate on their schoolwork and achieve when they are busy trying not to worry about being confronted by police, about who wrote the death threats to Blacks on the campus bathroom walls, about how not to become a statistic of failure. This unfriendly if not harmful environment results in “chronic stress and, therefore, decreased physical and mental health and social and economic opportunity” or “mental bandwidth” (Verschelden, p. xiii). Constant campus discourse about the equity gaps of our Black students taxes mental bandwidth, reifying rather than alleviating self-defeating perspectives about Black student success, regardless of the good intentions of faculty and administrators. Our DE Advisors recommend focusing on what works, the core practices that successful Black and Latinx students share. Through the campus Guided Pathways efforts, we do the same for faculty and have created City Ways: four practices that successful faculty share. A parallel effort for Panther (student) Ways is in development, led by our DE Advisors to identify in their communities the shared successful student practices.
Achieving Digital Access is Challenging
We also ask them and all students to successfully navigate the complex and imperfect academic technology environment we have created for them: one which requires digital skills to enroll in the college and complete coursework but that promises in its SLOs to teach the very digital skills it requires for onboarding. Add to this the additional barriers of a lack of student academic technology capital—complete access to the technologies, requisite skills and digital information competency—and the imperfect use of Canvas by their faculty who may not be well trained in online pedagogy and tools. With the help of the DE Advisors, we learned that their communities were not well informed about the campus Student Technology Help Desk, which connects students to functional academic technology, whether that be helping to remove a virus on a student-owned laptop, helping a student navigate Canvas, or helping set up the Canvas app or a campus email account on a student smartphone. We learned that our promotional efforts are falling flat and that we need to find more effective ways of reaching our Black and Latinx students. We already know that we need to improve our faculty use of Canvas, yet affirmation of that by the student communities is additional evidence necessary to initiate change on a large scale across the district.
We are Important Role Models
As faculty, we are important role models for students and need to walk our talk. Recent discussions on campus about the mandated use of cameras in Zoom were impacted when a DE Advisor pointed out that faculty lack of use of cameras in their own meetings with other faculty should influence the rules they wish to impose on student use of cameras; if faculty have valid reasons why they don’t wish to use cameras all the time, they should recognize that students have valid reasons as well. At academic senate and other faculty-centric shared governance meetings, DE Advisors provide much-needed student perspectives that remind us about the real lives of students. At the 20th anniversary of the Community College Research Center in 2017, Dr. Jill Biden reminded us that we must “document the lived experiences of our students”; the presence of the student DE Advisors at the decision-making table helps us do just that.
Most Influential Gaps Exist Between Silos
One of the largest gaps on our campus is the gap between instruction and student services, the organizational gap created when academic divisions exist too far away from the day-to-day operations of the student services divisions and their programs that serve our disproportionately impacted students. Collaborating across this organizational divide and welcoming each other to the decision-making tables that institute change on campus is a good step toward learning what changes need to be made to decrease the barriers to student success. The grant work that brought the DE Advisors to the DE shared governance table also brought student services colleagues to the same table and brought the DE Coordinator to the student services table; we are now working together more closely in order to identify systemic barriers and remove them. One result of this collaboration is the request to continue funding for the DE Advisors beyond the grant period and via the Distance Education campus Program Plan, partially funded by the Student Equity and Achievement Program. Funding their work from this resource provides accountability to the goals of reducing barriers to Black and Latinx student success, and it continues to help bridge the instruction-student services gap. The goal is for permanent funding to be located to support the DE Advisors positions permanently as a part of the campus DE team.
Change from the Inside Requires Outsider Perspectives
We have just begun our journey alongside our first set of DE Advisors (with more on the horizon as these move on to other academic opportunities beyond our beloved City College), and we are on the road toward changing our system for the better. Fixing any disparities requires a full understanding of those disparities as experienced from the perspective of those who suffer disparate outcomes, and once we understand those experiences, we can begin to fix the inequities they face in their lifelong learning journeys. Bringing students to the table and honoring their time with fair pay is a required step toward correcting the injustices established centuries ago and unintentionally reified by decades of incremental change that hasn’t gone far enough to eliminate systemic injustice.
Resources
Verschelden, Cia. (2017). Bandwidth Recovery: Helping Students Reclaim Cognitive Resources Lost to Poverty, Racism, and Social Marginalization
Warren, Mark R., and Karen L. Mapp. (2011). A Match on Dry Grass: Community Organizing as a Catalyst for School Reform
Wilkerson, Isabel. (2020). Caste: The Origins of our Discontents
Author:
Kandace Knudson
Distance Education Coordinator
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District or those of the California Community College Chancellor's Office.
Overview
The requirements for the Cybersecurity program at Palomar College consists of the completion of nine information technology courses. Five of the courses had been taught in a face-to-face format, constituting a gap in the program that precluded a pathway for completing the program completely online. The CVC-OEI Improving Online CTE Pathways Grant became a catalyst for a collaborative effort at Palomar College to provide students an opportunity to earn their cybersecurity degree completely online. This program prepares students for a career in cybersecurity as a Cybersecurity Analyst. The program emphasizes competency in computer, network, and application security for ensuring the security, confidentiality, integrity, and availability of enterprise computing and information systems infrastructure. The completion of this project illustrates Palomar College’s commitment to its mission further serving students of various educational attainment, employment status, and personal challenges. A fully-online Cybersecurity degree program minimizes most barriers that would prohibit prospective students from earning this degree.
Project Goals
The primary goal for this project was to develop five online courses that were previously only being taught in a face-to-face format:
Completion of these courses would fill gaps in a fully-online pathway toward an Associate of Science Degree or Certificate in Cybersecurity. Part of the course development included constructing, testing, and preparing documentation for a virtual lab environment.
Lessons Learned and/or Obstacles Encountered
In moving from face-to-face to an online format, financial inequalities among students led to a marked technology gap. Many possible solutions were evaluated to minimize these inequities and a cloud-based computing solution was selected to further improve the Cybersecurity online program. The core cybersecurity courses (CSNT 181, CSNT 250, and CSNT 255) were modified to provide cybersecurity lab environments in the cloud rather than relying on the students’ personal computers using virtual hypervisor software such as Oracle VirtualBox or VMware’s Workstation Player. Lab environments in the U.S. Cyber Range (Virginia Tech) and NICE Challenge Project (California State University San Bernardino) provide an alternative environment requiring less computing resources.
Another lesson learned was derived from working with the instructional designer to develop the pedagogical concepts of inclusive online course delivery into the course shells developed in this project. These pedagogical strategies included fostering an online environment that encouraged student-to-student interaction and mirrored on-ground student networking as much as possible. Example strategies include the use of student video introductions, group discussions and online study group discussion boards. Further work was completed to ensure that assignment instructions were duplicated in multiple locations so as to not be presumptuous of how students navigated the course content.
Details
During the transformation process of these courses, an instructional designer was utilized to help facilitate the online pedagogical strategies that were going to be used for these courses. A few of these strategies are worthy of noting. First, in traditional face-to-face courses, the instructor utilizes student introductions as a way to not only break the ice on the first day of class, but also provides students a way to get to know their classmates and share outside knowledge and experiences. The instructor also uses this process to assess where the students are at technically and their interests in the content of the course.
In order to facilitate this process in an online format, FlipGrid was chosen to provide a way for the instructor and students to introduce themselves. This gives students reassurance that they are not in the course alone and that creates a bond or a level of accountability to increase the likeness of student success in the course.
Flipgrid is linked to directly from the Canvas navigation menu and is a graded assignment to increase the probability that the student introductions will be completed. One caveat to this tool is that there isn’t an automated way to ensure that students watch every classmate’s video. This is a process that still needs to be worked out to ensure its successfulness.
The biggest challenge of moving these courses over to an online format was ensuring that the lab activities could be completed by students outside of the physical lab computers on campus. In the physical computer labs, the computers are configured to handle heavy loads such as running multiple virtual machines so that students can set up small virtual networks. However, it became evident in the first semester of moving these cybersecurity courses that some students were having difficulty setting up these virtual networks on their personal computers, especially in the introduction to cybersecurity course (CSNT 181 Hacker Prevention & Security).
In an effort to mitigate this technical difficulty that could potentially be affecting disadvantaged students, an effort to find a cloud-based solution was initiated. During the extensive research process of finding a solution, three separate possibilities were identified as potentially great options for different reasons. First, the U.S. Cyber Range, a project initiated at Virginia Tech (https://uscyberrange.org) was chosen to provide online lab activities for the three core cybersecurity courses. Second, the NICE Challenge Project from California State University, San Bernardino (https://nice-challenge.com) was utilized in the CSNT 250 Cyber Defense and Analysis course due to its real-life challenge scenarios for cyber defense analysts. In this platform, challenge scenarios are presented to students for them to complete a series of tasks that simulate real scenarios cybersecurity analysts may face. Finally, an additional cyber range was selected for both the CSNT 250 Cyber Defense and Analysis course as well as the CSNT 255 Ethical Hacking Principles course. This third cyber range is the University of Texas San Antonio Cyber Range (https://business.utsa.edu/cyber-range/) based on the Cyberbit platform. This cyber range is going to be used as a semester capstone project providing students with real-world attack scenarios that they must identify and defend against a simulated threat. These capstone projects will include a synchronous group exercise emulating their role in an actual security operations center (SOC).
While these cloud-based solutions still require students to have access to computers and the Internet, they don’t require as much computing power (e.g. CPU, RAM) as running multiple virtual machines. Palomar College has implemented this lab strategy for their cybersecurity courses for the 2020/2021 academic year and will monitor its effectiveness.
The following video illustrates some of the features presented in this blog: https://palomar.us-west-2.instructuremedia.com/embed/830e1cea-161a-4cc3-af18-d630070b0b3e
Author:
David Meske, DPA
Professor, Computer Science & Information Technology
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District or those of the California Community College Chancellor's Office.
Introduction
As Mount San Antonio College (Mt. SAC) continued to implement the California Virtual Campus (CVC) Course Exchange, we strengthened our support of faculty with a revamped Faculty Center for Learning Technology (FCLT) and noticed the absence of a student-facing equivalent service especially for online learning. The idea was produced to form a program focused on providing students with classroom technology support that is parallel to what the FCLT provides to faculty. The mission of the Canvasador Program is to help current Mt. SAC students successfully navigate Canvas as well as other learning platforms that faculty use inside of Canvas and in their courses. The unique feature of the program is that it offers peer-to-peer assistance which creates opportunities for students to learn from one another, build rapport, and foster a sense of community.
The launch of the program started with a highly successful recruitment campaign with over 100 applications received. After a deliberative and thorough search, seven very talented and highly skilled students were selected to serve as the role of a Canvasador.
Just as the Canvasadors began to lay the foundation for this exciting new program, in early March 2020, COVID-19 created the need for the Canvasadors to develop immediate self-help resources for students who found themselves struggling with the new all-online experience. Over the last 10 months, the team created synchronous and asynchronous resources for students which include tutorials, short videos, infographics, guides, and live workshops. In addition, the development of a homegrown ticketing system allowed Canvasadors to respond to over 127 student inquiries and created two student surveys which yielded rich data that helped guide the Canvasadors work as they learned about the most pressing technological needs of Mt. SAC students.
Creating a Presence on Campus and Online
Prior to the online shift for the college, the Canvasadors held weekly drop-in office hours and tabled outside the campus library in an effort to provide immediate assistance to students and promote the program. However, once the campus physically closed, it prompted this program to think of ways to establish its presence solely online.
One of the initial steps for the Canvasadors was to build a Canvasador course shell where students could check out resources and receive direct help. Early in the program two course shells were deployed, one where Professors opted their students into the Canvasador course, and another where students could opt in themselves. These were mostly replicas of one another, with slight adjustments to cater to their audience.
The next step involved creating a widespread social media presence in order to reach students. Accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram were created and proved to be very successful channels of communications with students. A YouTube channel was established to house all video content.
On campus, office hours were promoted outside the Academic Support and Achievement Center (ASAC) to encourage students to walk in and ask question. Student fairs were attended in order to spread the word to passersby of our services. A table was set up with items related to canvas, offering student assistance with any on-the-spot problems they had.
Data Gathering and Getting Student Feedback
Due to the shift to online learning, the number of courses utilizing Canvas grew along with the need for Canvasadors to support students with this new and challenging experience. With no information directly available on what students needed, it was determined a survey should be created and that it would be announced through a course shell that all students are enrolled in by default: The Mountie Student Hub.
The utilization of The Mountie Student Hub is significant because of the impact the Canvasadors were able to make within the hub. For example, messaging within the hub allows the Canvasadors to reach 67,000 credit and noncredit students who are automatically enrolled in The Mountie Student Hub with each registration cycle.
At the end of spring 2020, the Canvasadors worked on the development of the first technology learning needs survey. Utilizing the messaging portals within The Mountie Student Hub allowed students to quickly access and complete the survey. The data captured allowed the Canvasadors to get a better insight into the experiences of the students and the pressure points as they relate to their online learning. With the data available, the Canvasadors were better equipped to support their peers, and to advocate for their needs in a new, unexpected environment.
As the need for the Canvasador program became integral to meeting the technological support needs for students, it became clear that this program should have a support structure whose mission is also aligned with a focus on serving students. The Canvasador program made the shift from the Faculty Center for Learning Technology (FCLT) to the Academic Support and Achievement Center (ASAC) whose mission is to provide academic support services directly to students.
Being the Bridge Between Students and Administration
As Mt. SAC students, the Canvasadors have an understanding of some of the challenges a student might encounter. They have insight on the frustrations and fear of students through online interactions. When there is a common theme for these complaints, the Canvasadors will forward any complaints or suggestions to distance learning faculty leaders and administrators for follow-up. The Canvasadors also had the opportunity to attend Distance Learning Committee Meetings and shared the student perspective with committee members.
An example of this is Canvasadors’ response to the student experience with Proctorio. When there was a major concern for an online proctoring program, Proctorio, Canvasadors shared their experiences and worries with the faculty. FCLT staff organized a meeting with a representative from Proctorio, where students and staff asked questions and shared concerns about Proctorio. Canvasadors reached out to the student government and invited two other students based on the recommendation from a student government member. Hearing these concerns from the student body cemented the need to spread information to address these concerns and clarify any confusion.
The Human Connection: Helping Students
The Canvasadors are the voices of Mt. SAC students, utilizing their experience to support other students in their success. The worries of students are addressed, and solutions are made to ease their minds. The plan of action for most of these solutions is publishing information through social media platforms, creating relevant resources, and hosting workshops.
The Canvasadors strive to keep a constant social media presence by having a steady stream of content to publish across platforms. The goal is to notify students on Canvasadors’ updates from upcoming workshops to newly-created student resources. Furthermore, Canvasadors used the platforms to update followers on exciting news, workshops, or events hosted by student clubs and student programs.
In the current online learning environment, creating classroom-related tools and guides for students are essential. For example, as Proctorio has been an increasingly popular proctoring tool for professors, Canvasadors created infographics to inform students on what to expect using Proctorio.
As making content for the masses is essential, a personal touch is necessary in establishing a relationship with students. Hosting online workshops and one-on-ones are the best methods in directly interacting with students, where people can put a face to the name. After transitioning online, the Canvasadors have adapted and created a virtual office space via Zoom, where students can drop-in to webcam with one of the team members. The Canvasadors’ goal is to maintain and build a bona fide connection with Mt. SAC students.
The Results
Based on 2,000 student survey responses, 127 inquiries recorded from the ticketing system, three requests from student services for Canvasadors to facilitate “Canvas 101 workshops” for their students has proven a genuine need for this program. One Canvasador is embedded in the Minority Males Initiative Program, a safe space for group of students to support each other and to normalize help-seeking behavior. Additionally, the positive student feedback speaks to the quality and satisfaction of the resources and services delivered.
Our data analysis indicates there are many opportunities for the Canvasadors to respond and grow with each successive term. We want to learn more about the technological needs students have and how we can build resources to support our students. For example, the Canvasadors created tutorial videos on topics such as “how to contact your professor in Canvas and “how to submit assignments in Canvas.” We need to study the analytics of the videos to gauge usage and the effectiveness of the information. We look forward to improving our services to students and to the ways the college can institutionalize the Canvasador program.
Additional Information
Guide to Creating a Student Support Group
Authors:
Kristina Alvarado Grassmann
Director, Academic Support and Achievement Center
Canvasadors: Cyrus Kia, Jose Gutierrez, Sienna Machado, William Eden, Katriel Sedrak, Jodee-Anne Pagunsan
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District or those of the California Community College Chancellor's Office.
As many colleges experienced a significant shift in needs as a response to the COVID-19 Pandemic, MSJC felt the need to evaluate our initial project proposal and determine the best course of action to provide the best opportunity for success to our career education students. This meant reevaluating our goals for the Improving Online CTE Pathways project too. This blog post will address our initial proposal, and how we shifted our priorities and goals in response to COVID.
Initial Need Assessment
Our initial need was determined by a steering committee comprised of full and part-time faculty, classified support staff, career education, and distance education administration, as well as executive leadership. This group took this opportunity to do an in-depth analysis of institutional strengths, weaknesses, and challenges and determined the following needs could be addressed by this project:
This allowed us to organize the project into three separate, yet highly integrated, components: (1) Quality, (2) Visibility, and (3) Access. In an effort to maintain a high standard of quality both in technology and distance education andragogy, the first grant component (1) Quality is focused on faculty professional development and training to institutionalize quality distance education student success through course design, delivery, and student support systems and services. This activity will specifically increase the skills and abilities of Mt. San Jacinto College CSIS faculty to design and offer quality online courses in alignment with the CVC-OEI Course Design Rubric and accepted learning principles. Given that the CSIS pathways are fully online, Mt. San Jacinto College will focus its second activity (2) Visibility on increasing the marketing and outreach regarding the availability of the short-term CSIS certificate/ECC pathway to existing and new potential students. Lastly, the third activity (3) Access aims to create a strategic enrollment structure and mechanism that allows for the development and implementation of short-term early and late start courses that are appropriately sequenced and adequately supported to ensure quick time-to-certificate completion.
COVID-19 Response
In response to COVID-19 campus closures, we determined that we would continue to try and meet the original scope of work as identified; however, that developing the certification preparation course, testing center renovations, and issuing of certification exam vouchers would be difficult or impossible to complete. Thus, after careful review, we decided to redirect the remaining funding to increasing the quality of existing online certificates, credentials, and programs beyond the initially identified IT (Information Technology) programs. This new goal focused on providing training and course review stipends to faculty for any core course that is part of an existing CE certificate/degree program. We set a new goal of training CE faculty and aligning 45 additional CE courses with the OEI (Online Education Initiative) course design rubric with the reallocation of remaining funds.
Professional Development Funds
With the transition to almost all programs moving to a fully online delivery modality, we knew that providing faculty professional development and training related to course design, delivery, and student support systems would increase the skills and abilities of MSJC CE faculty to design and offer quality online courses in alignment with the CVC-OEI Course Design Rubric and accepted learning principles.
As one of our seasoned distance education CE faculty, Dr. Belinda Heiden Scott, reminded us, “Students need us to get this right. As students count on us, faculty, for a brighter future, and we cannot let them down. Therefore, professional development for faculty will allow us to move courses into online and hybrid environments.”
To meet this need, we focused on professional development training in Summer and Fall 2020 to prepare CE faculty for course review and alignment with the CVC-OEI Course Design Rubric.
MSJC DELTA and SQOT
At MSJC we are truly fortunate that we heavily invested in distance education support prior to the COVID-19 shift to essentially operating a fully online college (over 90% fully online instruction). The primary support for distance education is provided by the Distance Education and Learning Technology Advancement (DELTA) team. The DELTA Support Services department provides a variety of professional development and technology support to faculty who are teaching in both online and hybrid modalities. DELTA provides direct assistance to help faculty:
This existing foundation allowed us to quickly mobilize and provide over 10 sections of the MSJC Standards for Quality Online Teaching (SQOT) professional development training in Summer and Fall 2020 to prepare CE faculty for course review and alignment with the CVC-OEI Course Design Rubric. SQOT is a 6-week online training course that provides a foundation for quality course development and delivery, focusing on:
As Dr. Heiden Scott describes it, “MSJC’s Standards for Quality Online Teaching (SQOT) course provided the missing link to my delivery as a content expert.” As a facilitator of the SQOT course, she explains that faculty gain skills that may not already be common to subject matter experts: “using course objectives and creating with a backward design approach provides transparency in learning and teaching and streamlines the development of content chunking into modules to deliver quality online instruction for student learning.” This was evident in Dr. Heiden Scott’s reflection upon submitting her own courses as part of the CE course review and alignment process:
DELTA provided the professional development to remove my frustration and develop and arrange course content that was deliberately connected to learning objectives, creating engagement among myself and learners and learner to learner connection. I tackled an extensive Peer Online Course Review process using the CVC-OEI Rubric and Peralta Equity Rubric with DELTA's support to grow deeper. After going through a few course review processes, I was amazed I still had some holes in my knowledge. However, I could fill the gaps quickly by participating in DELTA learning activities. I am currently working on my fifth-course review.
And while SQOT is not solely focused on alignment with the OEI course design rubric, the principles and guidelines provided by the rubric are infused throughout the information shared and the activities faculty complete to demonstrate their knowledge and skill related to delivering a quality online course at MSJC.
Challenges
MSJC’S SQOT course was originally designed to meet the MSJC Academic Senate’s recommendation and Title 5’s requirement that distance education faculty be prepared to deliver online courses. This was supported by the MSJC Educational Technology Committee developing the Recommended Preparation for Distance Education Teaching Assignments at MSJC which was adopted by the MSJC Academic Senate in November 2019. This recommended preparation document set SQOT (or equivalent) as the minimum qualifying professional development event for online teaching. When all courses shifted to online delivery in response to campus closure, MSJC did not waiver in our commitment to quality online courses and maintained that all faculty should comply with the recommended preparation guidelines.
This meant that many faculty who never planned on teaching online were now not only attempting to teach in a modality they were not prepared for, but they were also taking on six weeks of demanding professional development to ensure they were in alignment with quality standards. The design standards set forth by the OEI Course Design Rubric proved to be a challenge for many faculty. As previously shared, many CE faculty are subject matter experts and have never engaged in formal teaching or education design learning experiences. This was reiterated when asked how faculty perceived the SQOT training. Dr. Heiden Scott shared, “I saw irritation in the faces and annoyance in the faculty's voices I was teaching,” but followed up by saying, “Faculty are working hard to move their courses into quality online delivery during a world pandemic. As quality educators, knowing we have DELTA in our back pocket, we are better prepared to teach and develop online and hybrid courses.”
Professional Development Accomplishments
Summary
While we were unable to fully meet the goals for our original project proposal, we are excited that this project allowed us to focus on professional development for our Career Education faculty at a time when it was most needed. By shifting our focus towards quality development and design of online courses, we are working in unison with our sister community colleges to achieve the CVC-OEI Improving Online Pathways goal to provide the best opportunity for success to our career education students. The best summary is provided by Dr. Heiden Scott, “Technology tools and processes will always be improving and changing; therefore, staying flexible to innovation and participating in professional development provides us the growth opportunities we need to support students' success in the classroom and completion of their degrees.”
Author:
Anna Stirling
Associate Dean of Distance Education & Professional Development
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District or those of the California Community College Chancellor's Office.
Summary
This initiative provides a means for instituting and promoting the integration of Open Education Resources (OER) across the curriculum at Mt. San Antonio College with an emphasis on Career Education courses. Numerous studies have found that implementation of OER initiatives on college campuses leads to significant benefits to instruction, student learning, as well as cost savings for students. Adoption of OER is spreading beyond clear issues of student affordability to the less obvious issues of access, completion, reducing time to degree, decreasing debt, advancing equity, and rethinking pedagogy. To launch and sustain this work, it is vital to create a process that supports the use of OER by faculty. Funded by the CVC-OEI Improving Online CTE Pathways Grant, this pilot provides preliminary steps towards creating such an environment at Mt. SAC.
OER Integration Plan
This initiative is predicated on the understanding that faculty hold the academic freedom to select their learning materials. It is not the intent of this plan to undermine those principles, rather, to offer more innovative sources of learning materials for consideration. This plan recommends institutionalizing faculty incentives to grow the use of OER on campus.
Faculty Support: Provide faculty with incentives to adopt, adapt, or create an OER.
For the selection of these materials, we used a rubric with the following selection criteria:
We selected 15 proposals from departments across campus including Audio Arts, Biology and Nutrition.
Overall, faculty had a positive experience in moving over their courses to use OER. There were, however, challenges including the changeover to online classes due to COVID-19. Nevertheless, 93.8% of faculty in this program said it was “very likely” that they would recommend OER to a colleague. Quotes from Mt. SAC faculty can be found here. With these OER awards, we estimate a potential savings of $104,834.69 to 647 students for the Spring 2020 Semester. Since the faculty participants agreed to use OER for two semesters, the potential savings across the two semesters is $209,669.38.
Additional Information
Authors:
Romelia Salinas
Associate Dean, Library & Learning Resources
Monika Chavez
Career Education Librarian
Esteban Aguilar
Electronic Resources Librarian
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District or those of the California Community College Chancellor's Office.
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